It could make a difference in our rural community where expensive satellite or cellular stick internet are the only options. I wonder if such equipment could be even be installed on the cell tower. Oh who am I kidding that would be 'unfair' competition!

It could make a difference in our rural community where expensive satellite or cellular stick internet are the only options. I wonder if such equipment could be even be installed on the cell tower. Oh who am I kidding that would be 'unfair' competition!

Dear duncansil,

We here at The TeleCo Company will gladly allow you to attach your white space device to our cellular towers. All we ask is that you pay a small monthly fee -- and don't let the fact that this fee will raise the cost of using your white space device above the cost of using our similar service, that has no bearing on the fee amount that we've established.

White space great for rural apps as part of a wifi everywhere buildout!!

We already have Google going wireless in NYC with free service in the Chelsea neighbourhood offering 10Mbs rates at an upfront cost of $4 a sub $2 annually - basically free.

Comcast is planning on copying and one upping them nationwide we are told by opening up all Comcast wireless routers (in your house) to public access - with a Comcast email address as a sign-on requirement. Shaw is copying them with it Shaw- Open business routers.

On the land line side Google is charging $300 for a minimum of 7 years of free innernet at 5 mbs compared to Big Telecom bills of $600 a year for the same service, in the two markets it's launched into so far. Could easily add a public wireless SSID on its customer routers.

Keep in mind when you are looking at regulatory and political corruption, that it would cost Big Telecom a small fraction of Google's costs to duplicate Google's offering as they already own the infrastructure that was long since paid for by the taxpayer.

Google's cost is $500 for each 1 GigE innernet connection. It is charged out at $70 monthly giving them a 7 month payback.

In fact, according to Time Warner their profit on broadband like is over 3000% with their ancient antiquated cable equipment. They could cut their fees to 3% of current level and still make money - lots of room for a nonprofit to provide a service at for a few bucks a month.

The fastest cheapest internet in the world is easily available with an internet overlay to power company smart meter programs which cover the operating region with fiber. For well under five bucks a subscriber one time cost to add wifi repeaters and home internet connections as needed.

Obviously, the muni power plan would pretty much put Big Telecom out of business, interfering with campaign donations and post political board of director appointments for our corrupt politicians, so it'a ain't a gonna happen.

What are the broadcast range benefits of running wireless over traditional broadcast television signals? Does it allow for drastically better signal range and reception? Do you have to tune the wireless standards to run on the frequency (or at least tune them for optimal compatibility?)

I mean, most television stations had a range of miles, not several hundred feet -- but they also broadcast vastly more powerful signals. Could you throw wireless signals for miles if you used conventional TV power levels on current spectrum bands, or is that a property of UHF/VHF?

It could make a difference in our rural community where expensive satellite or cellular stick internet are the only options. I wonder if such equipment could be even be installed on the cell tower. Oh who am I kidding that would be 'unfair' competition!

Or start your own telecom and hook into one of the main fiber routes that criss-cross the country. It's what the cell towers already do and besides, those towers wouldn't have room for the equipment needed fore whitespace Internet.

What are the broadcast range benefits of running wireless over traditional broadcast television signals? Does it allow for drastically better signal range and reception? Do you have to tune the wireless standards to run on the frequency (or at least tune them for optimal compatibility?)

I mean, most television stations had a range of miles, not several hundred feet -- but they also broadcast vastly more powerful signals. Could you throw wireless signals for miles if you used conventional TV power levels on current spectrum bands, or is that a property of UHF/VHF?

Depends on the terrain, but old analog OTA TV was known for some insane range with one tower.

What are the broadcast range benefits of running wireless over traditional broadcast television signals? Does it allow for drastically better signal range and reception? Do you have to tune the wireless standards to run on the frequency (or at least tune them for optimal compatibility?)

I mean, most television stations had a range of miles, not several hundred feet -- but they also broadcast vastly more powerful signals. Could you throw wireless signals for miles if you used conventional TV power levels on current spectrum bands, or is that a property of UHF/VHF?

it wouldn't be symmetrical if they reused the existing tv towers/xmitters, since those are multi-kilowatt beacons, versus the milliwatt current wifi works on. if you could use higher power devices, say maybe 10-20W in the home, then you might be able to have that range of miles (great for rural installations!), but would require tuning big bidirectional antennae. those power levels preclude use on smaller devices, at least with any sort of range. a multiwatt radio would suck you battery dry in no time.

It could make a difference in our rural community where expensive satellite or cellular stick internet are the only options. I wonder if such equipment could be even be installed on the cell tower. Oh who am I kidding that would be 'unfair' competition!

Dear duncansil,

We here at The TeleCo Company will gladly allow you to attach your white space device to our cellular towers. All we ask is that you pay a small monthly fee -- and don't let the fact that this fee will raise the cost of using your white space device above the cost of using our similar service, that has no bearing on the fee amount that we've established.

Yours,The TeleCo Company

Telco's don't own most of the towers, they're mostly owned by tower leasing companies which own and maintain them so you are free to put whatever on them so long as the slot is free, there is room for your ground equipment, and you can pay the going commercial rates.

As someone who lives in Morgantown, the initial rollout with the PRT makes me nervous. That thing is a monument to half-assed good ideas. I just hope that problems with the initial phase don't cause the whole project to fall apart.

This was something I'd like to see mentioned in the story - based on my reading of the PR, it seems white spaces will be used as the backhaul for the Wi-Fi on the transit system. So people don't necessarily need to buy new equipment, rather they will be able to use their current devices with 2.4/5GHz WiFi on the tram.

What are the broadcast range benefits of running wireless over traditional broadcast television signals? Does it allow for drastically better signal range and reception? Do you have to tune the wireless standards to run on the frequency (or at least tune them for optimal compatibility?)

I mean, most television stations had a range of miles, not several hundred feet -- but they also broadcast vastly more powerful signals. Could you throw wireless signals for miles if you used conventional TV power levels on current spectrum bands, or is that a property of UHF/VHF?

it wouldn't be symmetrical if they reused the existing tv towers/xmitters, since those are multi-kilowatt beacons, versus the milliwatt current wifi works on. if you could use higher power devices, say maybe 10-20W in the home, then you might be able to have that range of miles (great for rural installations!), but would require tuning big bidirectional antennae. those power levels preclude use on smaller devices, at least with any sort of range. a multiwatt radio would suck you battery dry in no time.

This makes no sense, like most of the proposal.

TV broadcasting sends out a SINGLE message, with no return channel. It makes sense to use a powerful antenna to cover a large area. Internet is like the cell phone system --- everyone wants their own data so bandwidth has to be shared. The best way to share is a dense collection of short-range antennas --- which is what both the cell phone system and "normal" wifi provide.

What seems to be in proposed here is something like a campus-wide version of the cell-phone system. (It's difficult to tell because the press release consists of nothing but self-congratulation, with zero technical details.) This would be nothing technically new --- just like standard WiFi, only using a frequency different from 2.4 or 5 GHz.

Does it make sense? Even in the campus setting, let alone can it be expanded to "rural areas" whatever that means? The problem is the 802.11 MAC (the way decisions are made as to who gets to broadcast next) was never designed for this sort of situation and would behave terribly the longer the distances (and so time-of-flight) involved. The 802.11 MAC is really really tightly coupled to latencies of the size of a mid-size building, say one wing of a hotel, nothing larger than that. Force it to a larger area (either by cranking up the power or by using lower frequencies with better wall penetration), and you're going to spend most of your time with the different stations involved interrupting each other and then waiting to try to renegotiate who gets to transmit.

Once you want a (high performance) network over a larger area, you really need to switch to a MAC based on central arbitration --- ie what the telcos do.

To me this all seems like a complete waste of time and money, unless there is something we have not been told. Far more useful (ie able to scale) would have been to base the technology on LTE at these frequencies. That doesn't mean you have to have a telco running the show, with all their oh-so-enlightened attitudes. But it does mean using a MAC appropriate to the problem.

It is possible that there is, lurking behind all this, a completely new 802.11 MAC based on a central arbiter. Something kinda sorta like this was proposed in the days of 802.11a and 802.11b but never went anywhere; maybe it has been resurrected. But the tone of the press release doesn't suggest that --- it suggests "let's run standard WiFi over a vastly larger area than it was designed for and sure, it will work just fine".

How exactly would this work? I mean, I'm not super great with all the technical aspects of wireless networking but I know that there needs to be a way for your browser/device/whatever to ping requests out to various servers in order to do, well, anything. Name99 touched on this above, but as far as I know the TV spectrum has no way to send things upstream short of a broadcast tower, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to pay the electric bill that powers one of those just to watch some YouTube away from a normal WiFi hotspot.

...Unless the tinfoil hat crowd was right all along and our TVs *have* already been surreptitiously watching us for decades, sending clandestine video feeds back to a shadowy command and control center on the Moon. Then we could just use that upstream channel, I guess.

How exactly would this work? I mean, I'm not super great with all the technical aspects of wireless networking but I know that there needs to be a way for your browser/device/whatever to ping requests out to various servers in order to do, well, anything. Name99 touched on this above, but as far as I know the TV spectrum has no way to send things upstream short of a broadcast tower, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to pay the electric bill that powers one of those just to watch some YouTube away from a normal WiFi hotspot.

...Unless the tinfoil hat crowd was right all along and our TVs *have* already been surreptitiously watching us for decades, sending clandestine video feeds back to a shadowy command and control center on the Moon. Then we could just use that upstream channel, I guess.

It would work akin to how satellite Internet kinda works today, but instead of having a satellite pointed off to space you have a directional antenna or a decent-sized multidirectional one pointed to a tower. This will be cheaper for everyone because towers cost less than satellites and faster because response times will be dramatically lower. What this whitespace technology provides is the backhaul, not the microdistribution of the Internet connection which is your home Wi-Fi router. It'll be like the modem in your cell phone, but it won't be low-powered and it will be in a dedicated device or contained in a Wi-Fi router.

If whitespace uses different spectrum, will current 802.11 b/g/n/ac devices work with the new services?

This is more for providing the WAN connection between a building and the ISP, and not for individual devices to connect to.

IOW, the public library would have a "White Spaces" device on the roof that connects it to the ISP, and then would plug a standard 802.11 access point or router in to provide the local area with wireless coverage.

Think of this as a replacement for your cable/ADSL modem, and not a replacement for your wireless access point.

How exactly would this work? I mean, I'm not super great with all the technical aspects of wireless networking but I know that there needs to be a way for your browser/device/whatever to ping requests out to various servers in order to do, well, anything. Name99 touched on this above, but as far as I know the TV spectrum has no way to send things upstream short of a broadcast tower, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to pay the electric bill that powers one of those just to watch some YouTube away from a normal WiFi hotspot.(snip...)

(emphasis mine).

The "TV spectrum" doesn't push anything in either direction; it's just a frequency allocation. And just because "TV spectrum" frequencies are used, doesn't mean that conventional TV gear is used, at either end - it isn't. The new white space gear is comparable to television only in its use of the frequencies.

It could make a difference in our rural community where expensive satellite or cellular stick internet are the only options. I wonder if such equipment could be even be installed on the cell tower. Oh who am I kidding that would be 'unfair' competition!

Or start your own telecom and hook into one of the main fiber routes that criss-cross the country. It's what the cell towers already do and besides, those towers wouldn't have room for the equipment needed fore whitespace Internet.

Or start your own national spy agency and hook into one of the main fiber routes that criss-cross the country. It's what the NSA already does and besides, ...

White-space frequencies, meanwhile, are under 700MHz. That means they will penetrate walls better, and can be used over longer distances, and should work even in cases where you don't have line-of-sight between the two antennas.

This is not super-long range wireless. It's just somewhat better than WiFi, and may make longer range wireless practical some places where WiFi isn't.

The speeds will be lower than 802.11g or others. A single white-space channel is only 6MHz wide, similar to the 5MHz wide channels 802.11b used, meaning the speeds will be roughly comparable.

White-space frequencies won't come in consumer devices, and won't have a big TV antenna connection... It'll have a somewhat longer antenna than WiFi devices, and you'll rent the device from your wireless ISP. The box will probably convert the link into a common WiFi signal you can use, or have plugs for RJ45 ethernet cables.

Its use in "libraries" is interesting, since they are centrally located in many cities, and are non-profit organizations. It would be very interesting to see if they could provide free, high-speed WiFi service to all their patrons, within maybe a mile radius with this technology.

Gibson wrote: it wouldn't be symmetrical if they reused the existing tv towers/xmitters, since those are multi-kilowatt beacons, versus the milliwatt current wifi works on. if you could use higher power devices, say maybe 10-20W in the home, then you might be able to have that range of miles (great for rural installations!), but would require tuning big bidirectional antennae. those power levels preclude use on smaller devices, at least with any sort of range. a multiwatt radio would suck you battery dry in no time.

If you're talking "white space" a TV antenna is all you need. A deep fringe TV antenna could definitely stretch the range. Since the white space freq's are predominately UHF, the antenna would be reasonably small with high gain.

...White-space frequencies won't come in consumer devices, and won't have a big TV antenna connection... It'll have a somewhat longer antenna than WiFi devices, and you'll rent the device from your wireless ISP. The box will probably convert the link into a common WiFi signal you can use, or have plugs for RJ45 ethernet cables. ...

Not neccesarily. A quarter-wave monopole at that would be about 4 inches long, 8 inches for a full half-wave dipole, and those aren't bad antenna designs. These might be a little bulky but they certainly aren't out of the realm of USB wireless adapters.